


Turned to steel

by TerresDeBrume



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 08:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Usually -and please, remember to emphasize usually- Transformation is used as a relatively positive term. Not by Pepper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turned to steel

Usually -and please, remember to emphasize  _usually_ \- Transformation is used as a relatively positive term.  
It’s about a scrawny guy with asthma becoming the hero of a nation, about a drunkard becoming the herald for freedom and fighting back against those who would harm the weak, it’s about a green rage monster becoming the largest shield you can give a country. People, she knows, use transformation as a good word, and for a long time, so did she… but that stopped after Afghanistan.  
  
There was a time when Pepper Potts would hear ‘transformation’ and think of magic tricks and phoenix moves, of sparkles and happily ever afters because, let’s face it, nobody wants to remember the werewolf, the evil witch, the vampire -those get their own words, they get  _change_  or  _turn_. Transformation is about taking lead and turning it into gold.  
If only they knew.  
  
The thing is, people who use that word can only see the glitter and the golden sheen, the riches and polished smiles, the pink cheek and pristine uniforms.  
Pepper is the one who sees the pain, the bruises, the blood. She’s the one who sees the face under the mask, and the wearied eyes and repressed sighs. Pepper saw Tony transform from Stark Junior to Iron Man, and every day the world sees the gold, she sees the steel beneath, hard and cold and unforgiving. Ironically enough, Tony  _used_  to be iron, hard as rock but brittle, always threatening to break if you hit it at the right angle, always avoiding shocks because he was well aware of his fragility and tried to preserve himself.  
  
Pepper was the one who watched him transform, emerging red-hot from the fires of his own personal Hell and tempered in a fall of glass and the blood of a man he’d cast as his father. Pepper was there when the sword was forged, with its pretty scabbard and gilded blade, something the world at large would mistake for an ornament, something harmless, something to be paraded around… but they don’t get to feel the cold kiss of it when the Iron Man’s mask falls. They don’t get to see that Tony is not -will never be a gun.  
Oh, guns are the weapons of their country, Pepper knows that. They are the cowboy’s weapons, a conqueror, thirsty for blood and land and supremacy, and that might have been true of the old Tony, fighting on without reason and doing all he could to grab the lion’s share… but not anymore. That Tony died in the desert, a cowboy’s death, and he was reborn as a knight in flying armor.  
  
Every transformation has its price though, and Tony is no exception.  
  
Standing in the dark outside Tony’s workshop, Pepper watches him work on the latest version of his suit, and she wonders if anyone but herself and Jarvis will ever realize there is more to Tony than revenge and the quest for lost honor.  
  
Tony pauses to rub at his ribs, where his stitches are probably stretching just shy of their breaking point, and Pepper wonders if anyone will be able to save Tony before it is too late.  
  
(She doesn’t allow herself to wonder if he  _can_  be saved.)


End file.
